Apologies for the lapse in posting! I just returned from a 10-day vacation that was both much needed and exhausting (lots of driving and sight-seeing and hiking and so on), and I’m currently trying to deal with my jetlag and combat my usual sickness-directly-after-a-trip routine, so I’m taking it a little easy for a few days. Working on a few drafts of articles and blogs and what not, trying not to lose my sanity when I step back and look at all the work I have to do.
So, in the meantime, here are a few links for you to look at/read/consider/get angry about!
1) My latest offering (SFW! Wahoo!) at Luna Luna Mag talks about what feminist porn is and what it’s not, by way of the things I saw and heard at this spring’s 2014 Good For Her Feminist Porn Awards and Feminist Porn Conference. When I left the conference and went to visit a friend, and that friend asked why I’d been in Toronto, and I said it was for a feminist porn conference, I got the, “‘Feminist’ porn? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” response. I get that response pretty regularly. So I wrote an article for people who didn’t realize this was a real movement.
2) Case in point that people need to be told that feminist porn is real: in this fantastic, quick-read HuffPo article, “The Porn Stars’ Guide to a Healthy Sex Life,” there are awesome quotes from Dylan Ryan, Courtney Trouble, Stoya, and Satine Pheonix about how to keep yourself happy and healthy. I suggest reading it! However, this is verbatim from the article: “Dylan Ryan, a sex worker advocate and self-described ‘feminist porn star’…” Notice the little elbow-jabby quotations marks? How she’s “self-described” because how could anyone consider that a real thing? Not like we can take sex workers at their word! Ugggghhhhh….
3) So this all started happening while I was away: Chase Bank started canceling the bank accounts of porn stars for no good (written) reason. Perez Hilton was the unlikely first reporter on the scene last week, but since then other news outlets from CNBC to TMZ to Jezebel to the Frisky to the New York Daily News have gotten in on the action, reporting that anywhere from a handful to “hundreds” of adult industry actors being told unceremoniously that Chase “determined that [these accounts] will be closing on May 11, 2014” for no stated reason. The common denominator, though, is of course these people’s work in the adult industry. I’m not surprised to hear about this–I’ve been working on a story about the financial discrimination faced by adult companies for some time now (it’s due out this fall in Bitch). But before now, the discrimination was leveled mostly at companies, not at people. This burns my cookies, folks. It’s certainly within a bank’s rights to determine who they want to do business with, but it’s another thing to close the personal bank accounts of people who earned their money through entirely legal channels and who aren’t hurting anybody, who need to be able to deposit paychecks and use debit cards to pay for groceries, loan payments, mortgage payments, and so on. This is low. I’ll be writing about this for Luna Luna next week, once the story has had a chance to settle a bit. I don’t want to go around making grand pronouncements until Chase–and now the Department of Justice–has had ample opportunity to explain. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. What I am interested in holding my breath for, however, is whether Wells Fargo sticks to its guns and allows adult stars to use its services, or if it jumps on the prude banking bandwagon… and if so, whether the DOJ has anything to say about it. In the meantime, here’s my pronouncement: this country, its government and its banks and its moral structure, is fucked. Close your accounts at Chase. Go elsewhere.
4) Did I tell you that you can hear recording of me reading my poems at Menacing Hedge? It’s a weird experience for me. I’m all about the performance of poetry being as important as the poetry itself… but I despise the sound of my own voice. Not sure why. I always have, though. So now it’s on the internet in audio poetry form.